“[Princeton undergraduate Alice] Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time.” – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
Tag: 12.04.20
How I Learned To Love Modern Poetry
“Book critics who know nothing about contemporary poetry learn to live with the terror of exposure. We’re like Cold War spies embedded in enemy territory, waiting for a joke we don’t get or some stray cultural reference that exposes us as frauds.” – Washington Post
New AI Can Predict Your Moral Principles
The development team “choose to focus on a theory commonly used by social scientists called Moral foundations theory. It postulates several key categories of morality including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The aim of the new models is to infer values of those five moral foundations just by looking at their writing, regardless of what they are talking about.” – IEEE Spectrum
Why Producers Are Killing Movie Theatres
“We’re witnessing a transformation of what it means to watch a movie. For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers. Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone.” – The Nation
How ‘Citizen Kane’ Got To Be, And Stopped Being, The ‘Greatest Film Ever Made’
“Maybe it’s hard to imagine now, but for many years, Kane‘s dominance wasn’t a matter of personal preference. It was practically a piece of data — like the name of the president, or the location of Florida. Miles and miles of words have been written about why Orson Welles’s masterpiece was so widely acclaimed … [and], of course, about whether it deserves that acclaim — not to mention who, exactly, is responsible for its greatness. But how did Citizen Kane become so firmly established at the top of the canon in the first place? Who put it there?” Bilge Ebiri gives a run-down of the history. – Vulture
The Complicated Legacy Of James Beard (And What It Says About American Food Culture)
“In the decades that followed World War II, no public figure prosecuted the cause of introducing America to seasonality, freshness, and culinary pleasure with greater vigor than James Beard. Gay, bow-tied, effusive, charismatic, and possessed of a lavish appetite, Beard had the misfortune to live in an era at once bigoted, repressed, paranoid, abstemious, and uninterestingly dressed. Today he is best known for the awards dispensed by his eponymous foundation, which remain, 35 years after his death at the age of 81, the most prestigious in the American restaurant industry. But of the man himself, contemporary memory is fairly shallow: He exists mostly in outline, as the bald, long-dead bon vivant beaming out at America’s eaters from illustrations, portraits, and the obverse of the culinary medals that bear his name.” – The New Republic
Great Dead Pop Singers Are Posting TikTok Videos
“Frank Sinatra has a TikTok account …, as do Whitney Houston, John Lennon, and Prince. Some of the profiles were clearly set up by the late-singers’ estates. Others seem to be the work of record labels, in a bid to introduce their catalogues to a younger generation. And while the phenomenon is a little weird, it’ll also probably work.” – Mic
Well, Someone’s Taken Credit For The Monoliths (Just Guess What They’re Doing Now)
“An anonymous collective called The Most Famous Artist says it was behind … the original steel stele in Utah as well as the replica that popped up in Atascadero, California, before being swiftly dismantled by a band of Christian zealots. And now — as if there were any doubt as to where this was headed — the collective is selling facsimiles for the low, low price of $45,000.” – Artnet
He Ran La Scala, Then The Paris Opera. Now He’s Moved To Italy’s Oldest Opera House
“The future will be very different, and I am convinced that it will no longer be possible for a theater to be passive, waiting for the public, even with a great program. So in the future I see two aspects that are not contradictory but actually complementary.” – The New York Times
The Organist Who Bought A Nova Scotia Church So He Could Practice
“In my childhood, it was quite difficult to go practice in some churches in Europe because we always have to [get] dressed up to go to the church, ask for the key from the priest or the minister, or we have to argue with some old Catholic nuns who were responsible for the church. They always said, ‘Oh you play the organ so loud, we can’t live here’. So now I’m alone and I can play as loud as I like…. Sometimes I play in pyjamas, of course.” – CBC